Fear of Imagination

A quote that really struck me from Haruki Murakami's "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" is when frog is discussing what is truly frightening to men. He quotes the author Joseph Conrad who said, "True terror is the kind that men feel toward their imagination." This highlights the very important human fear of things that are not in the realm of our control. We fear our imaginations because we are consciously aware of it but unable to completely control it. It is our conscious realization of our subconscious. Once our brains come up with something, we can attempt to reason and argue with our thoughts but they are still present. All the reasoning in the world cannot completely stop our minds from fixating on ideas that may not seem reasonable. In this story, Katagiri is wrestling with something that seems like it should be a figment of his imagination but also is very real to him. By the end of the tale he seems to completely accepted the occurrence as something that happened even though others will claim it was simply a manifestation of an overactive imagination. Katagiri has overcome his fear of his imagination so completely that it has become real for him.